Gregory Curtis - Paris Without Her: A Memoir

CHAPTER ONE

I remember clearly the first time I saw Tracy. It was on a sunny spring day in 1974 at the shabby offices of Texas Monthly, then just one year old. In those days the magazine was in a squat, miserable building at 15th and Guadalupe in Austin, Texas, that was torn down long ago. A staircase from the sidewalk led to the second floor, which the magazine shared with a dental laboratory run by a mysterious, solitary man. He was seldom there during the day, worked irregular hours during the night, and never spoke to any of us at the magazine, ever.

I was sitting at my desk, one among three others in a large room that was the writers bullpen, when Tracy appeared in the doorway. She was being shown around the office by the publisher, not that there was much to see. Unlike the four of us in the bullpen, she was elegantly dressed and radiantly beautiful, as she would be all her life. She had luminous skin, dark eyes, and luxurious, wavy black hair. I still know precisely what I was thinking at that momentnothing. I couldnt think. I felt a charged current electrify my brain, and that intense, electric moment would give her power over me forever. I didnt know then that I would marry her, but I did know that I loved her.

And I remember clearly the last time I saw Tracy. It was four in the morning, Friday, January 28, 2011. The chilly winter day had not yet dawned. I was alone with her in her room in a hospice. Her hair was thin and brittle, and her face was slack and pallid as she lay lifeless on her bed. She was three months shy of her sixty-eighth birthday. Oh, poor darling, I said.

I held her hand and kissed her and sat beside the bed, looking at her intently. During our thirty-five years of marriage, we had always known when one of us was looking at the other, even if our attention was elsewhere. When I felt Tracys eyes, or when she felt mine, we turned toward each other. Our eyes said everything. But now, of course, as I sat beside her, although she may have known somehow, somewhere, what I was thinking, she did not turn to meet my eyes. Instead, a vast emptiness opened before me.

There was a soft knock at the door. The men from the funeral home had arrived with the hearse.

Tracy had been a defiant smoker. She had started during high school and continued for most of the rest of her life. In 1997, an X-ray revealed a spot in her right lung, and two-thirds of the lung had to be removed. That spot turned out to be a hard little ball of cancer. Since it was so hard and compact, the doctors thought that all the cancer cells had been removed. Maybe they had, maybe they hadnt, but at least Tracy was frightened enough to stop smoking. But her lung cancer returned in 2003. This time we went to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, an internationally renowned institution whose treatment of cancer is as fine as any in the world. Her doctor was clearly brilliant, but also intense, concentrated, sometimes brusque. Tracy liked him. She also liked his unflappable, country-girl nurse, who somewhat sweetened his brusque effect. The doctor prescribed a regimen of chemotherapy and radiation treatments that would last six to eight weeks.

Every Monday morning, we drove to Houston, where we had rented an apartment near MD Anderson. We spent most of every day at the hospital until Friday afternoon, when we drove back to Austin for the weekend. Tracys treatments were painful and debilitating. There were also endless tests and appointments with various doctors, so we spent a lot of time in crowded, dismal waiting rooms until Tracys name would finally be called. MD Anderson is an immense labyrinth of long, dark hallways leading to banks of elevators and various attached buildings. It was easy to get lost, and we often did.

It was also dismal in the evening at the apartment we had rented. The smell of cooking nauseated Tracy, so I ate out and brought her back a milkshake, which was about the only food she could tolerate. We discovered that one of the cable channels there showed the nightly news from TV5Monde in Paris. We had taken several trips to France together and had become dedicated Francophiles. And we were both committed to learning French, although our progress had been slow. Now we sat together on a couch in the evening and watched the French news faithfully, although we didnt understand much. Andblessed miraclethat summer my alma mater, Rice University, won the College World Series. Neither of us followed college baseball, but we watched the final game, against Stanford, happy to have this unexpected and unlikely diversion from thinking about cancer.

Fortunately, the treatments seemed to be working and were discontinued after six weeks, although we had to return to Houston for checkups four times a year. Finally, on one happy day in 2007 when we were in the office of her doctor, he said, You are cancer-free.